The failure of an indie platformer

[Suzu Fanatic]

Interesting food for thought - esp. because one can easily substitute the examples listed about general gaming, into the current indie VN scene.

 

Not a huge fan of the guy, but it's a well expressed piece.

 

[firecat]

yes i agree, so many people are blinded on how easy it became but never understand what really happen.

[mjriedstra]

These "problems", if that's what they are, aren't endemic just to indie game creation. Whether it's making games, writing novels, creating music, or just getting up in the morning to go to our day jobs, no amount of effort and investment can guarantee success.

 

That said, working hard and doing a good job certainly improves your odds. Whatever you do, do it well, and keep doing it. Even if you continuously fail, you won't have less to show for it than someone who didn't try at all, and at least the possibility of success will exist.

[Clephas]

People are frequently blinded to just how odd the current explosion in the numbers of video games is... generally speaking, it was normal for only a few hundred games to be released a year world-wide, ten years ago.  The last time we saw the kind of disproportionate explosion in game-making we are now was during the dawn of video game console with the Sega master system.  The current gaming market is a bubble, but most people don't realize it.

[mjriedstra]

People are frequently blinded to just how odd the current explosion in the numbers of video games is... generally speaking, it was normal for only a few hundred games to be released a year world-wide, ten years ago.  The last time we saw the kind of disproportionate explosion in game-making we are now was during the dawn of video game console with the Sega master system.  The current gaming market is a bubble, but most people don't realize it.

 

It's true that both the number of games and the ease of their access have ballooned off the charts in the last several years, thanks mainly to the proliferation of simple platforms for distribution. I think it's a little misleading to classify it as a bubble, however, since it isn't as if the cost of creating the games is vastly outpacing their potential for revenue. If anything the opposite is true, with the highest potential for revenue growth being realized in the mobile market where the average game is less complex to develop and play than an average game from ten years ago, yet has the potential to make more money due to the increased size of the video game audience.

 

A small number of AAA titles with budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars exist, just as they have in the past. A large proportion of releases today (both indie and non-) are done on budgets of thousands of dollars (or zero dollars and just the investment of some time and talent). The very existence of the two extremes, plus everything in between, seems healthy overall, as compared to an exclusive club where you're either a huge publisher with millions to spend hiring teams of hundreds of people, or you're one of the people working for those publishers, or you're nothing. It's now highly possible to be small or independent and successful, something that hasn't been this true since the early to mid 90s during the original popularity explosion of PC gaming.

 

Of course, it's equally possible to put in a lot of effort and time and fail utterly, but that's true of every healthy industry. Intense competition raises the level of the products and benefits the consumer.

[Narcosis]

You have to keep in mind there are some downsides to this. Every market has a limit of how much it is able to consume; currently, we're producing much more we're able to consume. It's especially prolific in the mmorpg genre, where we have a lot of games to chose from and whole playerbase scattered across a vast sea of titles; the drawback to this is a lot of those games don't get the required ammount of players to work properly. They have to struggle to at least cover expenses and earn the people behind it enough to make a living.

In a nutsheel, this is - more or less - the current situation inside the japanese eroge industry. New tools, engines and publishing platforms made it so much easier to create content and games, nowadays literally everyone can create a game and sell it, as long as they have the willpower to push onwards. This leads to serious market oversaturation, where high competition isn't good anymore, but becomes harmful to the whole enviroment. To keep with it, developers have to either raise more funds or adopt specific business models; a lot of studios focus on smaller projects made in shorter ammount of time, which enforcers lower quality to keep up with the demand; they make less money as well. It's very easy to slip out of circulation and a lot of developers and studios often face an issue, where they simply have to give up or close their business, because it doesn't entail them any revenue, or worse - only generates loss.

It might be easier to debut on the market at the moment, but at the same time, it's a lot more difficult to stay afloat. Blessed are those, who are able to turn their hobby into a stable way to make a living.